Humpty Dumpty, Google and power

I'm at the summit of the International Society for Information Studies in Vienna, an amazing feast of brilliant minds and ideas. Dizzying switches from one set of inspirations to the next.

This morning we heard from Luciano Floridi, always worth hearing, who talked about the nature of power in the information society. He argued that "power in mature info societies is not just about things, or information about things, but about uncertainty (questions shaping answers, giving rise to information about things)". He illustrated this question of uncertainty with Alice in Wonderland, and the way in which Alice is aware of her own ignorance and uncertainty, as well as the information that is available to her.

Floridi went on to argue that power is in the hands not just of those who give answers, but who shape the questions posed by citizens of information questions - of Google rather than Wikipedia, as it were. (Floridi is a consultant to Google so knows what he talks about).

And that talk of power made me think of one of the most striking parts of Alice in Wonderland, much quoted by Gregory Bateson (who is so present at this conference even though he's been dead for 35 years). It's the words of Humpty Dumpty:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Which made me think further about power. Who decides what words are to mean? Who is to be the master of the words? Is it the individual, the person who uses or reads or hears the words? Or is the ones behind the words, who shape our words and understanding through the questions we ask?

In other words, who is the master of the words - is it us or is it Google?

One more thing: in discussion after Floridi's talk, my colleague David Chapman pointed out to me that words can't mean exactly what we choose, or not if we want to be understood by anybody else. They have to have some agreed common meaning if they're to be used for the purpose of communication. 

Which gives a third possibility: the master of the words (in Humpty's terms) needn't just be either the individual or the corporation - they could be the community of those who use words. It is still possible that we can collectively take power, manage our uncertainty in an information society, through the way we understand our words and understand our questions. Can uncertainty be owned by managed as a common good?

Postman Pat and the image of cybernetics

Image: Digital Spy

I went to see "Postman Pat: The Movie" today. No big deal, you might say (if you know that I'm the parent of a four year old). It must have been some production meeting when it was decided that what a 30 year old preschooler TV programme was missing was an army of killer robots - but that is indeed one of the main features of the movie. 

What amused me particularly was that the robots were created by the Cybernetics division of Special Delivery Service (Pat's employers, apparently a privatised spin-off from Royal Mail). So killer robots are the preserve of cybernetics. Which (since I edit a journal, Kybernetes, which has cybernetics as one of its main focuses and the source of its title; and since I'm off in a month to the 50th anniversary conference of the American Society for Cybernetics) got me thinking about the image of cybernetics in popular culture.

Now cybernetics has always been part of popular culture, ever since Norbert Wiener coined the term in 1948 with the publication of his book of that name (which bore the subtitle of "communication and control in the animal and the machine", always to me the single best definition of cybernetics still made, with its two pairs of linked terms). The book was published early in the cycle of ten conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation (1946-53), which became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. The conferences were widely reported by the press of the time, and the term 'cybernetics' became associated with a range of new ideas in the public imagination: robotics, the digital computer, and what Jean-Pierre Dupuy refers to as the 'mechanization of the mind': the idea that human beings could be replaced by machines. 

Image: BBC

So cybernetics became seen as futuristic, innovative, technological, but also very slightly sinister. And as Katherine Hayles discusses in her excellent book How We Became Posthuman, it has had that image ever since. Consider two science fiction villains: the Cybermen from the long-running TV series Doctor Who, and the Terminator from the movie of that name. Both are basically killer robots, although the Terminator looks human at the start. But both take their names from cybernetics - obviously in the case of the Cybermen, while the Terminator is referred to as a cyborg, a 1960 term that is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to an amalgam of human and machine (generalised to a transgressive boundary-crossing entity by the feminist scholar Donna Haraway). Even comedy gets in on the act: the robot Marvin in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. 

Cybernetics today continues to be a mixture of technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and psychology - though in many cases applied to human situations. Second-order cybernetics, which emphasises the importance of the observer, has brought in the importance of reflexivity to the field. Most modern academics and practitioners working under the banner of cybernetics would steer well clear of anything relating to mindless automata that seek to replace human beings. There are, of course, many contemporary technological projects to replace humans by machines (of which drones are perhaps the closest to killer robots), or to further turn 'enhance' humans with technology (witness our attachment to smartphones, rapidly diversifying into smart watches and smart glasses). Some are treated with public suspicion. But there's quite a gulf between them and the work today carried out under the name of cybernetics. 

So real cyberneticians won't be launching armies of killer robots any time soon. But it's interesting to know that even children's film producers just might expect it to happen.